SAVED: Eight-year-old Ruben van Ashout of the Netherlands suffered broken legs but was in stable condition after this crash, which killed 103 in Libya yesterday.AP

This miraculously lucky Dutch boy was the sole survivor of the crash of a Libyan airliner that fell short of the runway yesterday, killing all of the 103 other passengers and crew aboard.

Rescuers discovered the youngster amid the smoldering debris of the shattered Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A330-200 at the Tripoli airport and rushed to him to the hospital, where he was able to weakly utter the words “Holland, Holland,” to doctors to identify where he was from, according to Dutch media.

The boy was identified from his passport as 8-year-old Ruben van Ashout, CNN reported.

The child “has several breaks in both legs and is under intensive care, but is stable,” a doctor told Libyan TV, which showed the dark-haired child lying in a hospital bed with bandages around his head and wearing an oxygen mask.

The head of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, called the boy’s survival “truly a miracle.”

The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reported that the boy’s parents and an 11-year-old sibling were not aboard the flight.

At least 61 of the dead hailed from the Netherlands, according to Dutch officials, many who were returning from package tours in South Africa. In all, 93 passengers and 11 crew members were aboard the flight that had taken off from Johannesburg Tuesday night before “crash-landing on its final approach,” to the Tripoli airport around 6 a.m. local time.

The others killed were from France, Germany, South Africa, Finland, England and Libya, according to the Libyan transportation minister. Many were set to take connecting flights to points in Europe.

A large debris field stretched from the airport with piles of personal belongings, plane seats and bits of metal standing in the shadow of the plane’s snapped-off tail. That anyone survived was hard to imagine.

“We thank God for the sole survivor,” said Thabo Makgoba, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa. “In his survival, we see that even in this dark cloud of death, there is this ray of hope.”

The cause of the crash was not immediately known.

Officials said there were no signs of terrorism, and ruled out the possibility that the plane was brought down by the ash cloud that has spread from a volcano in Iceland, as it remains some 2,000 miles from Libya. Weather conditions and visibility were good at the airport at the time of the crash.

The plane was very new, having begun service in September 2009. It had flown only 1,600 hours and made 420 flights, officials said. The airline, which is the national carrier of Libya, began in April 2001 and had a spotless safety record.